"When colleges pick the one book that every new student should read... they tend to choose something of the recent-social-ills variety...."

"But colleges should consider the value in The Bacchae, something much older and, in its way, much more uncomfortable. Euripides’ play still matters after some 2,500 years because it is the product of a culture and a poet who were far better than we are at imagining themselves into a time when drunkenness was new. There’s a refusal in this play to take intoxication for granted. There is an insistence, instead, on seeing it as literally awesome — wonderful and frightening — in a way that seems to join our own adolescence and the far-off adolescence of our culture....  Of all the kinds of authority that Dionysus has deranged, it’s control over women that most dominates the young king’s mind. Again and again, in his increasingly feverish sobriety, he imagines how 'they fill great bowls of wine, then they creep into the bushes and lie down for lusting men.' 'I can see them now, in the bushes,'  [the king] tells Dionysus, 'little birds, trapped in the toils of love.' He is captivated and repulsed by alcohol, women, and sex... Dionysus promises to dress him up as a woman and smuggle him into their midst...."

From "How to Be Intoxicated," by Rob Goodman.